Restaurants eating up CPC budgets

SimilarWeb has found that the most-expensive desktop keyword in travel is "restaurants near me", averaging $3.78 per click.

"Cheap hotels" comes next, averaging $3.35 per click.

Not surprisingly, it is the big brands who are dominating. For "restaurants near me" TripAdvisor brands are hoovering up some 40% of the traffic, with businesses such as Yelp and Zomato some considerable distance away and securing only 5.2% and 3.1% respectively.

Restaurants are an important part of TripAdvisor's product line-up as it continues to build on its reviews heritage and morph into a bookings platform. It was more than a year ago that its CEO Steve Kaufer told analysts that restaurant bookings are "a frequent use case [and] leverage our existing traffic. It’s something we already know how to do. And when you get to scale, it works profit-wise.”